I am a professor and endowed professor at the University of Houston where I founded and direct the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and head the graduate program in space architecture. My background deals extensively with research, planning and design of habitats, structures and other support systems for applications in space and extreme environments on Earth. I have recently written a new book titled "Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax". It can be previewed and ordered at www.climateofcorruption.com. Additional information about my book and views can be found on my YouTube address: http://www.youtube.com/climateofcorruption.

Evidenced by public cooling towards global warming peril as a hot campaign issue, it is apparent that the Democrat party has been encountering a political climate change. The subject obviously hasn’t been viewed as a winning issue, nor has the anti-carbon “alternative energy” rationale supported by that contrived hysteria.

Nope, you’d hardly know from the presidential and V.P. debates that, as the 2012 Democrat party platform warns: “We know that climate change is one of the biggest threats of this generation…an economic, environmental, and national security catastrophe in the making.” In fact, it mentions global warming 18 times, stating that: “We affirm the science of climate change, commit to significantly reducing the pollution [carbon dioxide plant food] that causes climate change, and know we have to meet this challenge by driving smart policies [i.e., plug-in cars] that lead to greater growth in clean energy generation and result in a range of economic and social benefits [to favored fund-raisers and companies]. President Obama has been a leader on this issue.”

Could it be that the Democrats believe that, like defeating terrorism, their climate battle has already been won? After all, remember Barack Obama’s victory speech on the night he won the 2008 Democrat presidential primary when he said “[T]his was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal”? Well he does deserve some credit on quelling the ocean terror. Under his watch, they apparently haven’t risen at all. However, the rising debt does have the economy under water.

And just like the oceans, the climate and greenhouse pollution concerns that Dems emphasized in their platform never rose to gain much attention on their 2012 DNC podium in Charlotte either. Unlike 2008, when Al Gore blew onto the stage like a man-caused hurricane, he was nowhere in sight. Nor were the authors of their failed cap-and-trade bill, Henry Waxman or Ed Markey. The only mentions of these “threats” were voiced in a reference to “increasing climate volatility” in an obscure speech by Advanced Energy Economy co-founder Tom Steyer, a passing comment about “reducing greenhouse gases” in Bill Clinton’s address , and John Kerry’s statement that “an exceptional country does care about the rise of the oceans and the future of the country.”

Even Senator Kerry seems finally to have gotten the message that that “less is more” now applies to this tiresome topic. Frustrated over what he called “the flat-Earth caucus” of global warming skeptics, he recently said: “Even amid the ‘Tuesday Group’…a bi-partisan block of lawmakers, mostly Democrats, who are interested in energy issues… you can’t talk about climate now. People just turn off. It’s extraordinary. Only for national security and jobs will they open their minds.”

You gotta feel his pain. He and Independent Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman had worked hard to push a global climate crisis-premised 2010 carbon cap-and-trade bill, only to see its prospects for passage swept away in a Republican House cleaning. Kerry then charged that opponents to the legislation “made up their own science. They made up their own arguments. The Republicans created this idea of [carbon credit] trading because it avoided command and control by the Federal Government. Then they just decided to pick up and brand this a negative.”

He might very well be right about that negative branding, and not just only by Republicans. Egregious ClimateGate and related U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scandals have prompted many to rethink which side of the climate/energy issue “has made up their own science and arguments”.

An August 2011 Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of American adults showed that 69% said it is at least “somewhat likely” that some scientists have falsified research data in order to support their own theories and beliefs, including 40% who said this is “very likely”. (The number who said it’s likely is up 10 points since December 2009.) And while Republicans and adults not affiliated with either major political party felt stronger than Democrats that some scientists have falsified data to support their global warming theories, 51% of the Democrats also agreed.

This skeptical trend is likely to continue. While no sane scientists doubt that climate changes, or that our planet has been warming, at least from the time the last Ice Age and much more recent “Little Ice Age” ended, there’s no evidence that alarm-premised economy-ravaging carbon regulation schemes are warranted. Despite elevated atmospheric CO2 levels, there actually hasn’t been any significant warming over more than one and one-half decades. Records show that global temperatures have been up and down since 1997, but are now at the same place they were at the beginning of that year.

So does this mean that they won’t rise again? No, as generally recognized, climate changes are measured in multi-decadal timescales. Yet this routine standard didn’t inhibit Al Gore his acolytes from declaring that a previous warm period following 40 years of flat temperatures that lasted from 1980 to 1996 signaled a man-made disaster.

Perhaps there is actually little mystery as to why climate concern hasn’t been featured by Dems as a debating point. It might just be because they recognize that lots of voters are weary of witnessing many billions of tax dollars squandered on phony climate alarm-premised green subsidy fiascoes and empty promises of energy security and employment benefits.

In January 2009, President Obama pledged: “We will put Americans to work in new jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced—jobs building solar panels and wind turbines.” Then, undeterred by dismal experiences here and abroad, he renewed a commitment to “double down” on this agenda in his 2012 State of the Union speech. So just how well is that approach working so far?

Well, about 20 of those government-backed energy companies have run into financial trouble, ranging from layoffs to bankruptcies. Seventy-one percent of those Energy Department green energy grants and loans have gone to projects involving major presidential campaign money bundlers including members of his National Finance Committee, or those who contributed to the Democratic Party… donors whoraised $457,000, then received taxpayer-supplied project grants or loans totaling nearly $11.35 billion.

In fact, a report issued by the Government Accountability Office, the investigatory arm of Congress, raised concerns last year about favoritism in awarding some stimulus loan guarantees. The Energy Department’s own inspector general admitted to Congress that there might be reasons for such suspicion— that some contracts may have been steered to “friends and family.” Accordingly, the Energy Department’s inspector general is launching more than 100 criminal investigations into its own green energy program awards.

Maybe it has been a smart idea for the Democrats to go a bit light on the president’s record on climate and energy achievements after all, and concentrate their message on really critical matters…like switching from subsidies for green energy to subsidies for Sesame Street and contraceptives for female law students. And hey, why not let the planet heal itself just as it always has, even before Obama took charge?

In any case, one thing appears very clear. According to the presidential campaign priorities they emphasized, Democrats no longer seem to believe that global warming is an urgent subject warranting debate.

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For any of you listening, China has plans to buils 800 coal fired plants? Now you fools say we should pay higher energy prices; and guess what Obam a has made some of it happen. Look at the US economy and others following this path. China, Russia, India are laughing their collective arses off…

Any idiot whowants to live i a cave should just pull your plug and do so, but leave the rest of us alone, how is that?

What the election campaign shows is that there is no political upside to provoking the intervention of the well funded denialist propaganda machine when you’re trying to win an election. Calling the denialists “skeptics” is an abuse of language. They are not skeptic at all. They are well paid ideologues. No amount of evidence would assuage their “skepticism,” because their profession is prevarication. The scientific debate over global warming was over decades ago. What the election campaign shows is that millions upon millions of dollars spent on magazines, “think tanks,” and lackey “commentators” conducting a campaign of lies, personal attack, theft of computer records, and confabulation can (hopefully temporarily) bury the public understanding of science under a mass of bullshit.

You are so full of bull**** , it’s incredible. What “well funded propaganda machine”? You are delirious. The AGW proponents receive all the funding. I wish I was funded by “big oil”.

Most of the climate “science” that has been conducted so far is not “science”. It’s advocacy. The IPCC knew what their conclusions regarding climate change would be before the ink dried on their first report. The IPCC was formed by a bunch of radical environmentalists with an agenda. Climategate confirmed what a bunch of science frauds they are. You really think that scientists understood the earths climate system decades ago? You are seriously deluded. Mental. The predictions of future temperature increases with increasing CO2 are based solely on unproven, untested, scientifically flawed computer models. You obviously know shit about the scientific method. The IPCC makes ludicrous climate predictions to the year 2100. Are they falsifiable? No. They are unscientific to the nth degree.

The public is fed up with the lies and all the climate change bullshit, that’s why there is no political will to do anything. The AGW fanatics keep crying “wolf”, and the wolf never appears. They keep claiming our climate is in a crisis, when the data indicates that our climate is mild compared to times past. These alarmist have become so desperate that they latch on to any extreme weather event and proclaim the world is going to end, when we know that according to the data, extreme weather events have been decreasing.

The(fake)physicsguy – The IPCC was actually set up as a result of a deal between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Its current Director, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, was appointed at the insistence of the Bush administration because Bushco regarded the previous director, atmospheric chemist Dr. Thomas Watson, as too much of an environmentalist. Your ignorant reliance on quote mining from stolen email correspondence is duly noted, as is your totally uninformed disregard for climate models. It’s obvious from your previous blatherings that you have no understanding of the most basic statistics, let alone modelling. In short, another fact free post from PG.

This post is garbage, so not surprising to find it on the Forbes website. Relying on a 2011 poll re alleged falsified data does not clarify Americans’ views on AGW (see the recent Yale/George Mason poll October 2012, e.g.). In any event, the silence of the legacy parties on this matter is more plausibly attributable to their respective slavish fealty to Big Oil and Big Energy, than their sensitivity to public opinion.

I didn’t note the surveys released on October 9rh and 18th by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication because the questions they asked were obviously leading and biased . Unlike Rasmussen, both organizations clearly had their own “dogs in this fight”.

The two questions highlighted in the first poll titled “Climate Change in the American Mind” both exhibited “acquiescence response bias”, premising a reason for to support public belief in a global warming/weather connection :

1.“How much do you agree or disagree with the following statement: “Global warming is affecting weather in the United States”

2.“Some people say that global warming made each of the following events worse. How much do you agree or disagree?”

Both of these agree/disagree questions assume that respondents agree that global warming is presently occurring, although UK Met Office data released earlier this month indicates that there has been no overall warming over the past 16 years. This being the case, any responses to the 2nd question would make no sense since there was no evidence of warming to make conditions “worse”.

Question formulation for the second poll is even more flawed. It begins with a leading preamble statement that: “Recently, you may have noticed that global warming has been getting some attention in the news.” This implies that opinion leaders must think global warming is happening, because otherwise, why give the matter attention? Then it goes on to define global warming as “…the idea that the world’s average temperature has been increasing over the past 150 years …”

Then the second part of their global warming definition is that it “…refers to the idea that the world’s average temperature …may be increasing more in the future.” Sure. But since temperatures may also fall in the future, this definition is nonsense.

So is the third part of the goofy definition they offer…namely that, “the world’s climate may change as a result” of temperature rise. Yup, that’s hard to argue with. Isn’t a sustained average temperature rise…or drop…a pretty good indication of climate change?

And all this leads to frame the two most important questions in the whole debate:

1. “Which of the following do you think is true?”

•Carbon dioxide from human activities will most likely cause dangerous climate change in the foreseeable future.

•Human produced carbon dioxide is unlikely to cause dangerous climate change in the foreseeable future.

•No opinion/don’t know.

2.“How much of an increase in your cost of living would you accept to reduce carbon dioxide emissions?”

Has it possibly missed your attention that these surveys you cite to defend your positions were issued by organizations that depend upon climate alarm-premised taxpayer funding? Good grief! Take a cold shower.

While you guys debate semantics on questionaires you choose to ignore the strong consensus of scientific opinion as evidenced in the literature that global warming is and has occured in recent decades and that it’s caused primarily by greenhouse gases generated by humans. The debate among scientists on these questions is finished whereas the debate in the popular press still continues, in large part by those whose idealogical and/or financial interests would be threatened by any broad-based government measures to fight against this looming crisis. As a scientist I normally would have a hard time taking you seriously except that your self-interest and/or ignorance are or seem to be having an effect on public perception which in turn affects how elected officials deal with this issue.

1.^ Oreskes, Naomi (December 2004). “BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change”. Science 306 (5702): 1686. doi:10.1126/science.1103618. PMID 15576594. “Such statements suggest that there might be substantive disagreement in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This is not the case. [...] Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect.” 2.^ America’s Climate Choices: Panel on Advancing the Science of Climate Change; National Research Council (2010). Advancing the Science of Climate Change. Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press. ISBN 0-309-14588-0. “(p1) … there is a strong, credible body of evidence, based on multiple lines of research, documenting that climate is changing and that these changes are in large part caused by human activities. While much remains to be learned, the core phenomenon, scientific questions, and hypotheses have been examined thoroughly and have stood firm in the face of serious scientific debate and careful evaluation of alternative explanations. * * * (p21-22) Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.” 3.^ “Understanding and Responding to Climate Change”. United States National Academy of Sciences. 2008. Retrieved 30 May 2010. “Most scientists agree that the warming in recent decades has been caused primarily by human activities that have increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.” 4.^ Julie Brigham-Grette et al. (September 2006). “Petroleum Geologists’ Award to Novelist Crichton Is Inappropriate” (PDF). Eos 87 (36). Retrieved 23 January 2007. “The AAPG stands alone among scientific societies in its denial of human-induced effects on global warming.” 5.^ DiMento, Joseph F. C.; Doughman, Pamela M. (2007). Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren. The MIT Press. p. 68. ISBN 978-0-262-54193-0. 6.^ Boykoff, M.; Boykoff, J. (2004). “Balance as bias: global warming and the US prestige press1″ (Full free text). Global Environmental Change Part A 14 (2): 125–136. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2003.10.001. edit 7.^ a b Oreskes, Naomi; Conway, Erik. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (first ed.). Bloomsbury Press. ISBN 978-1-59691-610-4. 8.^ Boykoff, M.T.; Boykoff, J.M. (2004). “Balance as bias: Global warming and the US prestige press”. Global Environmental Change, (14): 125–136.

Larry Bell – If there is anyone who is less truthful about climate science than you, it is probably David Rose, the author of the “Daily Mail” article that you are citing re warming over the past 16 years. Here is what the UK Met Office had to say about the “Daily Mail” article: http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/met-office-in-the-media-14-october-2012/

As climate scientist Mojib Latif said of the “Daily Mail” (After they misrepresented his prediction of a slowdown in global warming as a prediction of another ice age) “What can I do? They just make things up.”

Frankly, Larry, with your space background, I have to wonder why you don’t devote your media access to promoting space exploration…something that would help humanity. Why do you waste your talents on trying to kill our grandchildren?

Gee Charles. I hate to break the news to you, but “consensus” is not one of the tenets of the scientific method. You claim to be a scientist, and yet cling to this erroneous notion that “consensus” is somehow important in matters of science?

I would suggest you request a refund from the community college that you received your AA “science” degree from.